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While their eye-catching aesthetics have been unkindly compared with 'Eastern Bloc, Cold War era' industrial design, these flagship cans still aim to please both head and ears

Is conventional headphone design an example of what biologists call convergent evolution – adoption of a common design solution because it's optimal – or something more akin to herd behaviour: doing it a particular way because we always have?

Training complete, he followed in his father's footsteps working with the Leningrad Philharmonic but his final years were in Munich. Christopher Breunig tells the story

When Herbert von Karajan took the Berlin Philharmonic to Moscow and Leningrad in 1969 he also gave a conducting masterclass for 12 students, where he was impressed most by the young Latvian Mariss Jansons, then 26. Jansons sat in on rehearsals where he said the orchestra 'played at two-hundred per cent capacity. It was unbelievable'. (Melodiya briefly issued on CD the Shostakovich Tenth from the Karajan concert.)

Two-dimensional wonder-material, Graphene, is making its way into driver cones, including Falcon's flagship

Oxfordshire-based Falcon Acoustics is perhaps best-known for two aspects of its business: first, it's a major supplier of drive units, both its own designs and those of partner companies; and second, it's the manufacturer of its own version of the classic LS3/5a speaker design [HFN Jan '19]. The Falcon Acoustics Classic 15ohm LS3/5a is fully BBC-licensed, hand-assembled in Oxford and 'the only LS3/5a in production that faithfully replicates the original BBC design published in Oct 1976'.

It was panned by the British musical press on its release in 1978, yet this shiny synth classic would not only peak at No 11 in the UK charts but see Jean-Michel Jarre break all records with a live performance of the album drawing a crowd of one million

Although there were many pioneers of electronic music, there's no doubting that Jean-Michel Jarre's 1976 album, Oxygene, was the first encounter with fully synthesised and sequenced music for millions of listeners across the globe.

While the industrial design is familiar, the Bellini preamp and Donizetti power amp boast entirely reworked internals for this 'Anniversary' guise. And power is prodigious!

It was back in 1995 that the Italian brand, Audio Analogue, launched its first product – the Puccini amplifier. A no-nonsense stripped-down integrated, it offered little more than an input selector and a volume knob, yet its no-frills approach won many fans. Subsequently the company has built a well-deserved reputation for providing a range of fine-sounding and stylish-looking amplifiers, and has also taken to the CD player market with models such as the Maestro and Crescendo.

The best high-end DACs often employ entirely bespoke converter technologies rather than off-the-shelf chipsets. We look at the first rung on MSB's range of 'ladder DACs'

Based in Silicon Valley, California, Jonathan Gullman and his brother Daniel have become major players on the international hi-fi scene, courtesy of their fine-sounding and technologically innovative range of MSB digital-to-analogue converters. For 15 years this team has turned out increasingly flexible products, and more recently the range has expanded to satisfy a wider group of potential customers.

Active or passive? Exposure's new outboard crossover allows you to experience both with the Kudos Titan 707

As divisive audio issues go, few get the battle lines drawn more steadfastly than the matter of passive versus active loudspeakers. It's not so long ago that we were hearing about tiny monitor speakers with onboard amplification said to be good enough to have dyed-in-the-wool enthusiasts abandoning five-figure systems of conventional amps and speakers. Forget valves vs. solid state, or analogue vs. digital: when it comes to the topic of active speakers, tempers seem to flare among the keyboard warriors.